A first look at Vuze Leap, a lightweight torrent client with search built-in

The makers of the popular BitTorrent client Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, have released a first public beta version of a new lightweight client they call Vuze Leap.

Why another torrent client? The company addresses that question in a blog post that it published to announce the beta.

Development focus was to create a lightweight modern client that is simple to use but offers all the privacy and security features users would expect from such a client.

While you cannot download Vuze Leap right now directly from the Vuze website, you can head over to Softpedia to download it from there instead.

The Vuze Leap installation should not pose any issues. I suggest you select custom installation to control all options during setup.

The application displays a search bar and free content bundles on the first page after start. These content bundles are similar to those that BitTorrent Inc offers in its clients.

A click on a bundle starts its download right away. You can use the search to find torrents of interest, or switch to the find tab instead to do the same.

Torrents are listed with their name and availability only. The interface does not display important information such as the total size of the torrent file, individual files that get downloaded, or how many seeders or leechers there are.

A click on details opens a web page in the default browser that offers additional information. It appears that only torrents from legitimate websites such as Archive.org or Legit Torrents are included in the search results.

A click on download moves the torrent to the download tab. Downloads begin automatically and display information about the size of the torrent, the download and upload speed, as well as the estimated time of completion and the percentage it has been downloaded already.

Information about peers, ratios or files included in each torrent are missing from the page as well.

The third and final tab lists the downloaded audio and video files. Here you find individual multimedia files listed and not torrents.

You can sort the library by audio or video, or use the search to find particular files using it.

Vuze Leap supports torrent files so that you can download those using the application. It does not seem to support magnet links at the time of writing, or at the very least, I could not get them to be loaded by the application.

The settings that the application offers are bare bones. You can change the download directory, configure speed limits, and make it run with Windows and the default torrent client.

If you are used to massive amounts of preferences of programs such as uTorrent, you will be disappointed in this regard.

Conclusion

Vuze Leap is a simple torrent client. It misses many features when compared to clients such as Vuze or uTorrent, but since the audience is different, that may not matter much.

Considering that it is a beta client, it works considerable well and should not pose issues even to users who never used torrent clients before.

With that said, even those users may require additional features and information that any torrent client should offer to its users.

As far as lightweight is concerned, Vuze Leap is using more memory than uTorrent does. In idle state, Vuze Leap is using about 50% more memory than the uTorrent client.

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About Martin Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand.You can follow Martin on Facebook, Twitter or Google+

Comments

One of the best things about Vuze (formerly Azureus) is it’s transport encryption and cryptoport. I never turn off ‘required’ for transport encryption, it keeps my provider from automatically assuming I’m downloading illegal movies. But I don’t see evidence of those in this new client. Thats not a good thing.

I use Tixati (www.tixati.com). I used Azureus for a long time but gave up on it when it became Vuze and turned into massive bloatware. I tried uTorrent for a while, but then they started trying to monetize me as well, so to the curb they went.

I think I learned of Tixati here on ghacks. (Thanks Martin!) It is a powerful bt client with a few features that I haven’t seen in any other client. It is freeware. Development has slowed, but honestly it should. It’s mature and focused in scope. New features would likely be bloat and/or of little interest to most users. The only downside is it’s Windows only, but that’s okay. I run it on Linux in a Windows Virtualbox.

I guess for newbie torrent users, it could be good or for people who don’t care about the torrent community and rather download and dash instead of actually seeding beyond their download period. I’ve tried a few others, but always stay with Bitcomet. I like all the detail it gives me, and the options in terms of speed for both uploading and downloading as well as throttle control for preferred peers by way of connection, URL, or share ratio. Also it makes sense to join the Bitcomet community using an account (logged in), instead of using it anonymously (not logged in) because it ultimately effects your max possible speed.

Way too many times people who complain about Bitcomet don’t actually have an account with them so don’t download as fast as they could possible. I’ve been an account holder since their first public release. With my recent ISP upgrade package I now download at approximately 9 megabytes a second on average. So grabbing blu-ray rips takes no more than a few minutes and in some cases a few seconds. In comparison, if I didn’t log into my Bitcomet client the same download can take hours if not days, so making an account and joining their community makes perfect sense to me.

About gHacks

Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.